Sitting judges face impeachment threats for rulings a president dislikes, the Senate can't agree on how to fill dozens of vacant benches, and public confidence in the Supreme Court is near a record low — is the third branch still functioning as an independent check?
Each issue breaks into the specific questions Congress actually fights over. Read each position, then head to the interactive version of this issue to mark which reflects your view and build a message to your representatives.
Six House impeachment resolutions were introduced against federal judges in 2025 alone — all in direct response to rulings against the administration, not to any allegation of a crime, bribery, or misconduct, the traditional basis for judicial impeachment. Chief Justice Roberts took the rare step of publicly rebuking the practice, warning that impeachment over a disagreement with a ruling isn't what the normal appellate process exists to replace, and threats against judges' physical safety followed the same rhetoric.
Only 15 federal judges have been impeached by the House in American history, and only eight of those were ever removed — nearly all for bribery, perjury, or personal misconduct, not for the substance of their rulings. Whatever one thinks of the specific decisions at issue, the fact that these 2025 resolutions have zero realistic chance of the two-thirds Senate vote needed to convict is itself a sign the constitutional guardrail against using impeachment to punish disfavored rulings is holding, even under real political pressure.
Federal judges issuing sweeping nationwide injunctions against a duly elected administration's core policies — on immigration enforcement, spending priorities, and personnel decisions — are exercising a scope of power the Constitution's framers didn't clearly contemplate for individual district judges, and raising impeachment as a possible check, however unlikely to succeed, is a legitimate expression of the separation-of-powers concern that unelected judges are overriding elected branches on policy questions courts were never designed to resolve alone.
The federal judiciary hasn't seen a comprehensive new-judgeship bill become law since 1990, even as the U.S. population has grown roughly 30% and district-court filings have risen by a comparable share over the same period — the case for new judgeships is a matter of basic caseload math both parties' own courts have documented, not a partisan talking point, yet a bipartisan version of this bill was vetoed once already when timing math favored the other party.
The JUDGES Act traces back to a genuinely bipartisan 2024 deal, negotiated specifically so the new judgeships would be allocated to “the next unknown president” regardless of party — a structure designed to depoliticize judgeship creation that has nonetheless been criticized from both directions once an actual winner was known, showing how hard it is to keep a nonpartisan process nonpartisan once the outcome is no longer hypothetical.
The Judicial Conference — the judiciary's own nonpartisan policymaking body — has recommended new judgeships in nearly every biennial report for over a decade, and the version of the JUDGES Act advanced in 2025 was ordered reported by the House Judiciary Committee with support that included Democratic votes, evidence the underlying need for more judges is not seriously disputed even when the timing and allocation are.
The Supreme Court's 2023 code of conduct remains entirely self-enforced, with no independent body empowered to investigate a complaint or impose a consequence — even Justices Kagan and Jackson have publicly said the Court needs an enforcement mechanism it currently lacks, and reporting on undisclosed gifts and travel from wealthy benefactors to sitting justices has continued with no external check on whether the code is actually being followed.
Public support for term limits specifically has been unusually broad and durable across party lines — a 2022 AP-NORC poll found two-thirds of Americans in favor, including majorities of both Democrats and Republicans — even though the two parties disagree sharply on the code-of-conduct enforcement question and on whether any of this should apply to sitting justices or only to future appointments.
An enforceable ethics code raises a genuine separation-of-powers question neither side has fully resolved: who outside the judiciary would have the constitutional authority to investigate or discipline a sitting Supreme Court Justice without itself compromising judicial independence, and proposals to date haven't answered that question any more concretely than the Court's own 2023 code did.
The blue-slip tradition — letting a nominee's two home-state senators effectively veto district court picks — has been honored by Judiciary Committee chairs of both parties for decades specifically because it protects against a president packing courts in states represented by the opposing party without any local buy-in; abandoning it now would remove one of the few remaining checks a minority party has left over district court appointments.
Even as the President has publicly and repeatedly pressured his own party's Judiciary Committee chairman to eliminate the blue slip entirely, Chairman Grassley has kept the district-court tradition in place — the same choice made by the Democratic chairman who preceded him — while continuing to advance the President's circuit court nominees under the different rule that has applied there since 2017, showing the fight is specifically about district judges and U.S. attorneys in states with at least one Democratic senator.
A sitting president's constitutional authority to appoint federal judges and U.S. attorneys shouldn't functionally depend on which party holds a state's Senate seats, and treating an unwritten Senate custom as an effective veto — one that has blocked nominees in several states with a single Democratic senator — arguably frustrates the President's Article II appointment power more than the Constitution's actual advice-and-consent process requires.
Nine justices was itself a political choice tied to the number of federal circuits in 1869, not a constitutional requirement, and the size of the Court has changed seven times in its history — expanding it to 13 justices, one per current circuit, would restore that original logic while ending what proponents describe as a stolen, illegitimate conservative supermajority built through norm-breaking confirmation fights rather than ordinary turnover.
Every past change to the Court's size happened when one party controlled both Congress and the presidency and used that power to reshape the Court's composition for its own advantage — including the size increases that favored Republicans in the 1860s — which is precisely the historical pattern critics on both sides warn a new expansion would repeat rather than resolve, regardless of which party did it next.
Court expansion proposed explicitly and repeatedly for the stated purpose of changing the ideological balance of a Court whose current composition the proposing party dislikes is court-packing by definition, not structural reform — the same logic FDR's 1937 plan used and which even a Democratic-controlled Congress rejected at the time specifically because it recognized the precedent it would set for future majorities of either party.